Memoirs of a Superfluous Man
Chapter Eight
Peggio assai che l’averla perduta
Egli è il dir; la mia gente è caduta
In obbrobrio alle genti ed a me.
—BERCHET.
IN EUROPE, almost as soon as I had got my bearings there, I discovered that food can be interesting. I had been brought up on food that was good and abundant, but nothing to stir one’s imagination. One excellent result of this was that I have always preferred a simple diet. Fortunately, any kind of good food agrees with me perfectly and I can eat it with relish, but I prefer the simpler sort, and in Europe I found out for the first time how much can be done with the simplest dishes. What is simpler than potato soup, casserole of veal, fish chowder, stewed chicken, partridge-and-cabbage? Yet in the country where I lived, these were works of art. Another good result of my being brought up in the unimaginative Anglo-American tradition of the table, is that I am no great stickler for variety. My appetite is not flighty. The Greeks never showed their wisdom better than when they said, “Let’s have a fine thing two or three times over,”—Δὶς ἢ τρὶς τὰ καλά. If a dish pleases me, I hardly care how often I have it; I can pretty well eat it day in and day out. This monogamous habit clung to me when I was amidst the foods and wines of Europe, so no doubt I missed many confections which I should have looked into, but as I was not setting up for an epicure I did not mind.
What article of diet is more unpretending than Block Island turkey, otherwise known as salt codfish? We have three or four ways of dealing with it, all good, all fair-to-middling palatable, all profoundly unexciting. The Portuguese have forty-one; I think I must have sampled most of them. The way of it was that an altogether lovely and charming young Lisbonienne told me she knew the whole forty-one and could do nearly all of them herself, and among her family and friends the rest might be easily managed. If I could stay in Lisbon long enough, she would mobilise all her reserves and put me through the entire docket. This was impracticable, however, for I was going up through the country and would not return to Lisbon until the time came to take a steamer for Rotterdam. She compromised by giving me a list of dishes to pick from wherever I might be able to get them on my way; so, for a matter of two months or more I found myself subsisting mainly on salt codfish. Like a gallant girl who believed in her country’s cause, she offered to forfeit a kiss for each dish I should report unfavourably when I came back to Lisbon. I was pretty sure there must be a chance for me somewhere in a list as long as that, but none turned up; so, being on my honour, I regretfully did the right thing, and never harvested a single kiss.
Thinking to do my American friends a good service, I brought over some cook-books which turned out to be useless. The trouble was that Dutch and Flemish and French cookbooks are written for people who already know how to cook in those traditions. They are silent about all sorts of little matters which a native cook would attend to without being told, and which make all the difference in the world with the product. There seems to be even more to it than that, according to a pretty broad hint I got one day from the proprietor of my favourite restaurant in Brussels; a hint which made me think of Opie’s famous answer, “With brains, sir,” when some one asked him how he mixed his colours. I had screwed up my courage to ask this virtuoso if he would give me directions for making his type of stewed chicken, which was not quite in the mode of Mechelen or of Gand, and was far better than either. To my surprise he said he would do it with pleasure,—delighted,—if I could stop by next morning he would have the recipe for me in full detail. “But,” he added, after a moment’s reflection, “you can’t make it.”
“I can’t make it after your directions?”
“Oh, no,—quite impossible. If you went into my kitchen and I stood by you all the time telling you what to do, even then you couldn’t make it.”
I got the recipe next day; it was all he said it would be, I still have it; but there the story ends.
It seems rather odd that after all my experience with European food I should have had to come back to the United States to find the one food which is not only the best in the world from the standpoint of dietetics, but also aesthetically the most interesting and (to me) the most palatable. Up to that time, sheer provincialism had kept me away from Chinese cookery in New York and San Francisco. I may have thought vaguely that birds’ nests and rats were the staples of it; some silly quirk of fastidiousness, anyway. Once when I had come back from Europe for a three months’ stay, however, my friend Mr. Chan Pak-Sun put me through a course of it to cure a villainous run of nervous dyspepsia, which it did in astonishingly short order. Since then I have stood by it consistently when I have been in this country, and have given it as careful study as I could. When I asked Mr. Chan to explain my remarkable cure, he said in his polite, deprecating way, “You must remember that my people had brought the science of cooking to practical perfection when your ancestors were eating their food raw.” When one looks into the matter and puts a little thought on it, one sees how this is so.
It is a commonplace that a country’s food is a reliable index to its degree of civilisation, and my experience has convinced me of its truth. Where I found the most interesting food, as in the Low Countries, Denmark, France, Norway, there I found the soundest idea of what civilisation means, and the clearest understanding of the discipline necessary to produce it. On the other hand, where I found the dullest appreciation of food, as in America and the British Isles, there I found the idea of civilisation standing at the lowest level, and there also by consequence I found its discipline most persistently disparaged and disallowed. The contrast gave me a lively notion of what existence would be like if the Anglo-American conception of civilisation should prevail in the world, as it then seemed likely to do, and now seems even likelier. Its chief representatives in those days were repulsive enough, but their successors today are men—and women—whose very names make one shudder.
II
In my early thirties I perceived that I could get on better outside my native land than in it, so I decided to put in as much as possible of my lifetime in some other part of the world. I had nothing against America or American society; nothing whatever. The author of the Imitation says acutely that “the fewer there be who follow the way to heaven, the harder that way is to find.” My trouble was that hardly anybody was going up my street, which made the street hard to find and harder to keep to. Vandals had broken down most of the traffic-signs, and knaves of every description had so defaced the rest that they turned you off in the wrong direction at almost every fork and cross-road. Moreover, I knew I had nothing to contribute to our society that it would care to accept. The only contribution it would care for was something that might helpfully fall in with its doctrine of economism, and I had nothing of that sort to offer. The whole sum of it was that I was like a man who had landed in Greenland with a cargo of straw hats. There was nothing wrong with Greenland or with the hats, and the man might be on the best terms with the Greenlanders in a social way, but there was not the faintest chance of a market for his line of goods.
Economism was rampant in Europe, but it had not yet made a clean sweep of the survivals, the vestiges, of an opposing philosophy, nor had it yet obliterated all traces of traditional respect for that philosophy and for those who represented it. Not for nothing had Europe gone through its long, intensive experience of the doctrine that man does not live by bread alone, that the whole content of human life can not be summed up in the production, acquisition and distribution of wealth. America had no such fund of experience. Knowing only the philosophy of economism, it respected none other, made place for none other. One who represented any other was clearly superfluous in its society. His philosophical existence must be a hole-and-corner affair which he would carry on as a sort of spiritual Robin Hood. The prospect looked rather bleak and benumbing on the whole, so I decided that I had best pack up my philosophical straw hats as soon as might be, and go where there seemed to be a little more doing in my line.
This decision brought me in sight of the curious notion which Mr. Pearsall Smith observed as prevailing in American society, that a person who leaves America for reasons like mine is somehow unpatriotic and disloyal. I could not understand this, and the more I reflected on it the more mechanical and unintelligent this view of patriotism appeared to be. What is patriotism? Is it loyalty to a spot on a map, marked off from other spots by blue or yellow lines, the spot where one Was born? But birth is a pure accident; surely one is in no way responsible for having been born on this spot or on that. Flaubert had poured a stream of corrosive irony on this idea of patriotism. Is it loyalty to a set of political jobholders, a king and his court, a president and his bureaucracy, a parliament, a congress, a Duce or Führer, a camorra of commissars? I should say it depends entirely on what the jobholders are like and what they do. Certainly I had never seen any who commanded my loyalty; I should feel utterly degraded if ever once I thought they could. Does patriotism mean loyalty to a political system and its institutions, constitutional, autocratic, republican, or what-not? But if history has made anything unmistakably clear, it is that from the standpoint of the individual and his welfare, these are no more than names. The reality which in the end they are found to cover is the same for all alike. If a tree be known by its fruits, which I believe is regarded as good sound doctrine, then the peculiar merit of a system, if it has any, ought to be reflected in the qualities and conditions of the people who live under it; and looking over the peoples and systems of the world, I found no reason in the nature of things why a person should be loyal to one system rather than another. One could see at a glance that there is no saving grace in any system. Whatever merit or demerit may attach to any of them lies in the way it is administered.
So when people speak of loyalty to one’s country, one must ask them what they mean by that. What is one’s country? Mr. Jefferson said contemptuously that “merchants have no country; the mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.” But one may ask, why should it? This motive of patriotism seems to me perfectly sound, and if it be sound for merchants, why not for others who are not merchants? If it holds good in respect of material gains, why not of spiritual gains, cultural gains, intellectual and æsthetic gains? As a general principle, I should put it that a man’s country is where the things he loves are most respected. Circumstances may have prevented his ever setting foot there, but it remains his country. If Mr. Ford and Mr. Rockefeller had been born in Burma and lived all their lives there, America would still be their country, their spiritual home, with the first call on their every patriotic sentiment. They would, as we say, “belong here,” because here is where the things they love are devoutly, nay, exclusively respected. Then if they came here in person, one would envy them their emotion at finding themselves spiritually in step with an enormously numerous society whose sole basic philosophy was theirs. What could be more exhilarating than the sense of complete spiritual unity with more than a hundred million of one’s fellow-beings? After all, as Dumas said, “man is man’s brother.”
Burke touches this matter of patriotism with a searching phrase. “For us to love our country,” he said, “our country ought to be lovely.” I have sometimes thought that here may be the rock on which Western civilisation will finally shatter itself. Economism can build a society which is rich, prosperous, powerful, even one which has a reasonably wide diffusion of material well-being. It can not build one which is lovely, one which has savour and depth, and which exercises the irresistible power of attraction that loveliness wields. Perhaps by the time economism has run its course the society it has built may be tired of itself, bored by its own hideousness, and may despairingly consent to annihilation, aware that it is too ugly to be let live any longer.
Yet I have always a regard for the America I had known in my earlier years. In those days the ineffectual impulse which moved my friends the reformers and “progressives” was at least understandable. One could think of American society as Bishop Warburton thought of the English Church, that like the ark of Noah it “is worth saving, not for the sake of the unclean beasts that almost filled it and probably made most noise and clamour in it, but for the little corner of rationality that was as much distressed by the stink within as by the tempest without.” Nevertheless, with America’s basic philosophy what it was, and is, how could the thing be done?
In Europe I watched the slow relentless suffocation of life’s amenities as the various peoples were forced closer and closer into the pattern set by economism. Brussels was Brussels when I first saw it; amenity still existed in its society, the whole organisation of its life was amiable. Its pleasures and diversions were amiable, unmechanised, satisfying. They gave the sense of being taken as a wholesome and regular part of life. One was as much at home in the museums, the concert-hall, the theatre, the opera, as in one’s own house. Going to the opera was not a laborious and costly job, and it gave one no sense of being let in on a purely professional occasion. I would get a light, unhurried dinner at the Trois Suisses or the Pourquoi Pas, and then when the bell rang I would leave my hat and overcoat in the restaurant, walk twenty steps to the Monnaie’s side-entrance, and join in a performance of high professional excellence pervaded by the spirit of the highly-gifted, highly-cultivated amateur. I say “join in” advisedly, for one felt that one belonged there, one was a participant, not an auditor, an outsider. Then when the performance was over, I would retrieve my hat and coat, stroll over to some near-by resort for a taste of steamed mussels and Spatenbräu beer while I listened to some energetic discussion, perhaps of the opera, perhaps of any other subject under the sun, and then if the night were pleasant I would walk home.
All this is perhaps a small matter, but it will pass as an illustration showing how the aggregate of many such small matters combined with some that were larger to make up the total of an amiable life. In my years there, however, I saw the curious phenomenon of great continuous improvement in the mechanics of civilisation going on pari passu with deterioration in the quality of civilisation itself. Economism kept bringing in a steadily increasing volume and variety of the apparatus of civilisation, its comforts, conveniences, devices to save time and labour, devices which if used intelligently would promote amenity; but with a curious constancy, the larger this volume of apparatus grew, the fewer and scantier the amenities of life became, and the faster the general standards of civilisation declined. One remarked the progress of this deterioration wherever one looked, in the current ideals of taste, manners, education, culture, religion, morals and art.
In Belgium I observed also that as the material benefits of economism increased and multiplied, not only did the quality of civilisation deteriorate, but also the quality of happiness. One of the things which mainly attracted me to Brussels in the first instance was the evidence of happiness I saw there, notwithstanding the slightness of the material basis on which they rested. An American who had some business connexion there,—this was in 1911,—said to me one day, “It’s a queer place. From our point of view everything in the country is dead wrong, and yet they seem to be the happiest people 1 ever saw.” This remark made an impression on me, for I had just returned from America where I could not see that as a people we were happier than we were in the bad old times before economism had given us so much apparatus. What I saw in both countries convinced me that like the task of civilising a society, the task of making it happy is beyond the power of economism, quite as the religionists and moralists have said it is.
When the war of 1914 broke out, I was not prepared to attribute more than a purely casual significance to it. Having its roots in the philosophy of economism, it served only to accelerate a degenerative process which had been steadily going on since first that philosophy overspread Western society. In my view it was a mere incident, more or less spectacular, in the general “course of rebarbarisation” which Herbert Spencer in 1898 so clearly saw Western society taking. Its antecedents being what they were, it was a consequence inevitable at some time or other, and the time happened to be then. With this view of the war I naturally had no interest in it. What I saw of its action, which was not much, has so far passed out of my memory that I doubt I could recall any of it accurately. I kept no track of it, read no newspapers, heard few reports. When one has known for forty years precisely how a society’s course of rebarbarisation must turn out in the long-run, one does not waste one’s attention on day-today incidents of its progress.
I have often thought it might be amusing to write a humorous essay on how to recognise the Dark Ages when you are in them. Did the average European in the last half of the fourth century know that the Dark Ages were closing in on him? I rather doubt it. Probably he took the overspreading of ignorance, corruption, violence and bestiality as being pretty much the regular thing, and evading or warding off their impact was merely so much in the day’s work. Probably many of them took this state of things as a challenge, as the world’s normal dare, and barged in ruthlessly to beat it on its own terms, at anybody’s cost but their own. People are like that now, and doubtless were like that then. In all likelihood the man of the Dark Ages did not recognise symptoms, or know what they meant, or pay any attention to them. Indeed, how could he? Knowing no history, he could not understand history, and so he had no rule of comparison by which to measure the quality of his civilisation and determine whether it was changing for the better or the worse. The tide-gauges set up by Lucilius, Juvenal, Horace, Persius, Tacitus, may as well not have existed, as far as he was concerned.
Since 1914 I have been watching social symptoms, especially in the United States where economism has had everything its own way and has done its best. Here again the neolithic masses of the present day have no historical measure of their own society; virtually no one knows anything of what has gone before him, still less could understand its interpretation. Virtually all accept economism’s word for it that where you have “prosperity,” railways, banks, newspapers, industry, trade, there of necessity you have civilisation. One who hinted that a society might have all these and yet remain uncivilised; or that a society might have almost nothing of any of them, and still be quite highly civilised;—anyone hinting at this would be laughed at. Since 1914 the only virtues that I have seen glorified with any kind of sincerity or spontaneous acclaim are barbaric virtues, the virtues of the jazz-artist and the cinema-hero, tempered on occasion by the virtues of Jenghiz Khan, Attila, Brennus. The ideals I have seen most seriously and purposefully inculcated are those of the psychopath on the one hand; and on the other, those of the homicidal maniac, the plug-ugly and the thug. In a book published three or four years ago, an able and experienced observer of social symptoms, Dr. Alexis Carrel, says:
Moral sense is almost completely ignored by modern society; we have, in fact, suppressed its manifestations. All are imbued with irresponsibility.... Robbers enjoy prosperity in peace; gangsters are protected by politicians and respected by judges; they are the heroes whom children admire in the cinema and imitate in their games.... Sexual morals have been cast aside; psychoanalysts supervise men and women in their conjugal relations. There is no difference between wrong and right, just and unjust.... Ministers have rationalised religion; they have destroyed its mystical basis. They are content with the part of policemen, helping in the interest of the wealthy to preserve the framework of present society; or, like politicians, they flatter the appetites of the crowd.1
Turning then to another order of social symptoms, Dr. Carrel says further:
In the state of New York, according to C. W. Beers, one person out of every twenty-two has to be placed in an asylum at some time or other. In the whole of the United States,... each year about 68,000 new cases are admitted to insane asylums and similar institutions. If the admissions continue at such a rate, about one million of the children and young people who are today attending schools and colleges will sooner or later be confined in asylums. In the state hospitals there were in 1932, 340,000 insane. There were also in special institutions 81,580 feebleminded and epileptics, and 10,930 on parole. These statistics do not include the mental cases treated in private hospitals. In the whole country, besides the insane, there are 500,000 feebleminded; and in addition, surveys made under the auspices of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene have revealed that at least 400,000 children are so unintelligent that they cannot profitably follow the courses of the public schools. In fact, the individuals who are mentally deranged are far more numerous. It is estimated that several hundred thousand persons not mentioned in any statistics are affected with psychoneuroses.2
I suppose one might add to this the testimony of a prominent alienist who told me lately that while the secrecy of the drug-habit makes it impossible to get accurate statistics, a conservative estimate would put it that more than two million of our population are to some degree dependent upon drugs. Perhaps it might also be remarked that in the spring of 1941 the Selective Service System reported that forty per cent of the men examined for the draft had been rejected as physically unfit for service.
The quality of civilisation attested by these symptoms does not appear too much unlike what one would have expected to find prevailing in the Dark Ages. In the face of it one can only smile at all the current sublimated drivel about the preciousness of “democracy.” Yet it is nothing to get stirred up about, to arouse resentment, or to evoke the pestilent meddlings of what Mr. H. G. Wells calls the Gawdsaker. Mere hopeful fiddling with these symptoms by devices of political quackery does nothing but aggravate the radical disorder which gives rise to them. The widespread corruption of a society which has committed itself root and branch to the philosophy of economism is to be regarded sub specie aeternitatis as simply an example of cause and effect. “Things and actions are what they are,” Bishop Butler said, “and the consequences of them will be what they will be.” There is no known way in the nature of things for well-meaning persons to play the part of deputy-Providence and cut in on the acceptance of a social philosophy to make it bring forth any social consequences save those it must bring forth.
During the last twenty years I have often thought it would be rather a grim joke on our pretentiousness and gullibility, if some pukka historian of, say, A.D. 2942 should decide that the apprehensions of Max Nordau’s “more highly-developed minds” were well-founded, and that a second Dusk of the Nations had set in on Western society about A.D. 1870. I am not at all sure but that he might make out a pretty plausible case for that date, when the time comes.
III
Living in Brussels in the years before 1914 was to me curiously like living with one’s best girl in the days of chivalry and romance. You liked to visit other cities, look them over, perhaps make up to them a little, maybe chuck one or two of them under the chin, but when the train rolled into the good old North Station and you came out on the Place Rogier into the dear creature’s arms, you would not trade her off for a whole haremful of what you have seen. Her ways and manners, her unpretending grace and charm, her feel of stability and soundness, are all just as you have been impatiently expecting to find them, and her face wears a jolly Flemish smile as you whisper in her ear the phrase of pure contentment, Oost west, t’huis best.
She has a pair of attractive sisters, Antwerp and Liége, and doesn’t care how much you philander with them; in fact, she rather likes it, for it is all in the family and she isn’t above a wicked sisterly satisfaction in putting their noses out of joint. She is not even jealous of her shoe-string cousin Luxemburg, a raving beauty, but encourages you to go over every spring for a long flirtatious visit. She herself is perhaps a little on the plain side when you think of the opulent handsomeness of Paris or Kiev, although her city-hall square is the finest single-group object in Europe. One of the pleasantest ways to spend an idle morning is to sit in front of a café on the north-west corner of the square with some beer and a field-glass, and pick out the ornamental details of the city hall and the guild-houses. As often as I did this I never failed to find some spot of beauty that I had not noticed before. Knowing that the spire of the city hall was completed exactly fifty years before Columbus sailed gives rise to many reflections. One thinks there may be something in Artemus Ward’s idea that it would have been better for the world if the savages had given Chris a warm meal and sent him home again ore the ragin Billers.
Aside from this one feature Brussels has little to take the eye of the sightseer or casual visitor. Her points of beauty and interest are disclosed only gradually to her intimates, which is as it should be. The street-names in the old part of town were a matter of unending diversion to me in my hours of idleness. Those which marked the street as a seat of some occupation, institution, or personage, were easy,—Chicken-market Street, Hospital Street, Bishop’s Street. So were those named for some physical peculiarity, like One-person Street, so narrow that two can hardly pass without “scrooging.” But many streets have names whose significance is completely lost. In my dalliance with them I did not really wish to know what their significance was, nor would I have thanked any one for telling me. I believe some Belgian archivist has done something with the subject, but I never cared to look up his findings. Aware that a street is the most nearly permanent of all human institutions, my satisfaction was only in musing over them, guessing, contemplating the retrospect over the long course of busy life which they had witnessed.
Stoofstraat,—there almost certainly was the site of a public bath in the Middle Ages when, strange as it may seem, people did more bathing than they did in the Renaissance and afterwards. Krakeelstraat, the street of the Quarrel,—what quarrel, and when, and why? One would say it must somehow have been a pretty distinguished affair, for quarrels were never uncommon here in the old days. The little street not a pistol-shot long, called Eclipse,—was a tavern or some sort of rendezvous by that name located there? The street of the Virgins,—what virgins and what was the connexion? I heard the vague legend that a mediæval fountain stood there, three naked girls in stone à croupetons, delivering water after the naïve manner of the Manneken-Piss. It may have been so; this bit of naturalism was not an uncommon design for fountains in the Middle Ages. Zespennigenstraat, the street of the Six Counters, what we now call poker-chips,—a large building, extremely old, stands here, which by all appearances was once an inn. I thought that in mediæval times it might have been one called the Six Counters, and the street took its name from that. There was considerable business going on in that neighbourhood; the street called Navets suggests a vegetable-market or herb-market, and the Potbakkersstraat testifies that the flourishing earthenware-industry had its headquarters there; so probably an inn thus conveniently situated would get some trade.
But life in Brussels was not all dreams and visions, nor yet was it all beer and skittles. Brussels was always a hard-working, busy town, and in that atmosphere I did more and better work,—if one can call it work,—than I ever succeeded in doing anywhere else. One could read and study with unruffled attention and think with undisturbed concentration. Oddly enough, one would say that my immediate surroundings were anything but conducive, especially in my last habitation. My living-room was an immense affair, nearly fifty feet long by thirty wide, with a handsome parquetry flooring, probably once a ballroom. It was full of authentic Second Empire furniture, with mirrors galore, and large oil-paintings in gilt frames. My landlord told me that once when the old queen was having her portrait painted, she chose to come here for her sittings in order to get the real thing in background and surroundings. I do not vouch for this, for the old gentleman’s tongue hung in the middle, and some instinct told me he was not always reliable. Still, I must say that the queen could not have chosen better for her purpose, so the story may have been true. A humble student might expect to feel lost and addled in the midst of all this gorgeousness, but I found it inspiring and delightful. My improvised work-table was a tiny thing with a heavy top in brown mottled marble, but it served me, as I said, for the best of what little literary work I have ever done.
In Brussels one passed one’s days in the rich, balanced, intelligently-organised sort of life that I had vaguely felt must exist somewhere, if only one could find it. One could work at one’s best as long as one liked, then stroll out, sure to find pleasures that were intelligent, diverting, restful, the kind from which one always learns something. On almost any summer evening a concert would be going on in the city-hall square. There were more musical societies in Brussels than there were black cats, and a more deadly spirit of rivalry among them than cats ever knew. It is an inspiring sight to see the Amphion Society (or whatever its name might be) march around the square and into the stand, full of grim determination to make the Arion Society, who are to play there tomorrow night, sound like fish-pedlars. I heard Meyerbeer’s Struensee played there one evening by some amateur group in a way that I have long hoped to hear again, but never have. In the fifteenth century the Low Countries taught music to the whole of Europe, as Rabelais bears witness in the incomparable prologue to his Fourth Book, and they still can do it. The Belgian musician has all the scholarly correctness of the German, and he adds to it an unfailing superiority of intelligence, an elegance of finish, a style and grace, which I have never found elsewhere.
My club was the most interesting in Europe, I believe, and I would wager incidentally that it set the best table of any. It was made up largely of the official set, endlessly experienced, hard-baked, devoid of illusions, who discussed the rationâle of public affairs with Bismarckian frankness. I so well remember the wily old stager Baron X, as he sat with me for long hours one evening five years ago, dissecting “the European situation” like a surgeon, and telling me precisely what would come of it, and why. Again, in conversations on trains or street-cars or in cafés one would get the talk of mature, experienced people. Belgians have a good deal of the Americans’ gregariousness and affability; they enjoy passing the time of day with strangers. Once in a chance talk about political theory under the new régimes in Russia, Italy, and Germany, my fellow-gossip said impatiently, “Oh, that’s all the same thing, that’s Statism. We know all about that, we went through it years ago.” He was one of the plain people, not a student; I gathered that he had some sort of commercial agency, for he seemed to be familiar with various kinds of machinery. I wonder how many such men in America would know that Communism, the New Deal, Fascism, Nazism, are merely so-many trade-names for collectivist Statism, like the trade-names for tooth-pastes which are all exactly alike except for the flavouring.
Then again of an evening there might be the chance of an hour’s chat with Mme. B. after one had watched her spit fire at Filena in Mignon; or a discreet making-up to Filena herself when she had laid aside her stage-trappings, a charming person and a great beauty. Or perhaps one might make up a little more seriously to another charmer, then about at the end of her student days, full of hope and ambition, ready to shine brilliantly in Les Noces de Jeannette. A truly lovely young woman, and the most bewitching of soubrette singers, her career was ruined by a strange disability. After three years of heroic struggle at the Opéra-Comique, she was driven off the boards and almost into insanity by incurable stage-fright. I do not know what became of her, except that she survived the war. I met her accidentally about fifteen years after her retirement, and spent two or three days with her at her home in a suburb of Paris. Our talk often took a nostalgic turn, which made my visit rather a sad one, on the whole. Her first reminiscence was of going over in the old days to eat moules-frites on the Beenhouwersstraat, after the opera. Odd, I thought, that such a trifling matter should have been the first to rise to the surface of her memory.
Tout s’en va, tout passe, l’eau coule, et le cœur oublie. That is how life is, and one should be thankful for it, as Flaubert goes on to say, for the soul could not bear the whole weight of accumulated experience that piles up day by day. Yet one is thankful, too, when some trifle of sentimental recollection has unexpectedly escaped oblivion. One of the great historic scenes which I would give much to have witnessed took place in front of a café opposite the Comédie Française. George Sand passed by, a dowdy, musty old woman, making her way against a driving rain, and collided with a little old man who wore a decoration in his button-hole. Untangling their umbrellas, they both lost their temper and blackguarded each other venomously for several minutes. One of a group inside the café said, “Gentlemen, there is something worth seeing. That man is Jules Sandeau.” Once they had lived together, perhaps married, and had collaborated in literary work for some time. Now neither had recognised the other. Better so, no doubt. It seems unnatural and harsh, but telle est la vie. Les nœuds les plus solidement faits se denœuent d’eux-mêmes parce que la corde s’use. C’est une grande misère, mais....
IV
Several times I have spoken of my luck. Good fortune has indeed followed me with strange persistency, up to the last three or four years. Previous to that, to the best of my recollection, no misfortune ever befell me but such as I brought on myself. Nor do I recall that I ever had a door closed on me without my subsequently discovering the best of reasons why it should have been closed. I doubt that many can say as much for the impersonal direction of their passage through life. My one piece of bad luck came at the outset, in my being born when and where I was. I do not say this by way of complaint, nor do I hold it as a grievance against the order of the universe, for I have no grievance nor any complaint to make. On the contrary, I feel that with the luck which has attended me, I have done extremely well, undeservedly well. Nevertheless the fact stands; and even so, I count myself lucky beyond expression to have lived through the last sixty years rather than the next sixty.
Probably most reflective persons have now and then looked back desirously on some period, some civilisation as better suited to them than their own. One of my friends was saying to me only the other evening that he would like to have lived in London of the eighteenth century. Others have spoken of Elizabethan England as their choice, and others again of Athens in the days of Pericles. My choice would be for none of these. If I could have made a deal with an easy-going Providence, I would have elected to be born in the Paris of 1810, and after a year or so of quiet retirement on the island of Port-Cros, slip out of life in the autumn of 1885 and be buried there in the unkempt little cemetery near the manor-house. My only stipulation would be for as good an education as the one I have had, and for money enough to go on with in a reasonable way, without anxiety.
The blight of economism did not settle on all classes in France until long after 1840; indeed, as late as 1860 one did not see the evidences of its contaminating contact on every hand. People stayed where they were, content in the practical philosophy of Candide; an unsettled, nomadic life did not attract them. In 1850 France had barely fifteen hundred miles of ramshackle railways, their ownership parcelled out among twenty-four companies, all virtually bankrupt. When Thiers held the portfolio of the Interior he went over to England to inspect the railway-systems, and on his return said, “I do not think railways are suited to France,” thus setting back railway-construction a good ten years. Noble fellow, Thiers!—one can forgive him a great deal for that. Even after 1870, even after the Second Empire had strained every nerve to push the cause of economism, France obstinately remained a country of agriculture, artisanship, crafts and trades, home industries. Paris itself remained a city of small shops which were closed for a couple of hours each noon and for a month or so each summer. The idea that there is something to live for besides the production, acquisition and distribution of wealth—this idea died a slow, hard death in France. One whom fate had cast for the part of a native of Paris in the period 1810-1885 would have had all the best of it.
For never in the world, I believe, have so many great practitioners of the good life, the truly humane life, been gathered together in one place, as in the Paris of that period. In no other society could a humble amateur of the humane life get so effortlessly a clear and complete conception of what that life is, what its philosophy is, and what its rewards are. In no other civilisation, if I may say so, would he find himself less an alien, less a superfluous man.
One reason for my choice, perhaps the main reason, is that among the fourscore names which occur to me off-hand there are so many borne by men whom one would give anything to have known, irrespective of their achievements and proficiencies. This is most unusual. At other times and places there were men whom one admires and respects immensely, but one does not feel attracted to their society. With all one’s exalted reverence for Herbert Spencer one would be indifferent to his acquaintance. One is not drawn to Carlyle, Mill, Dickens, Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Trollope, by what one knows of them, any more than to Thiers, Balzac, Eugène Sue. Works on the social life of Paris in the nineteenth century,—among many others, the memoirs of Véron, Houssaye, Bertaut, Halévy, du Camp, Daudet, Claudin, Scholl and the anonymous author of An Englishman in Paris,—these testify that one would hardly know how to choose among those from whom the light of the humane life shone out with such irresistible fascination. To have grown up with Guizot, Cousin, Villemain, Duruy; to have been on friendly terms with Ste.-Beuve. Renan, Scherer, Taine; with the novelists Dumas, Mérimée, Daudet, Tourgueniev; the painters Delacroix and Horace Vernet; the poets de Vigny, Leconte de Lisle, Sully-Prudhomme, de Musset; the musicians Adam, Auber, Meyerbeer, Rossini, Offenbach! The list seems endless.
In the Brussels of the incoming century one lived on remnants, it is true, but they were sound remnants. One could still feel oneself at the centre of things, which was what I needed to clean off whatever spots of provincialism and parochialism might be defacing my philosophy of existence. I had been forming my views of life and mankind on my own, as every dweller in America, where the winds of doctrine blow only one way, is obliged to do. I was uncertain about them, needing reassurance of what in them might be right even more, perhaps, than correction of what might be wrong. For this a larger experience was necessary, an exposure to as many different “climates of opinion” as I could find, and Brussels afforded it. The civilisations of Holland, Germany, Luxemburg, France and Austria were all within easy reach, and ever since the twelfth century Brussels had done as big a trade in ideas as it had done in merchandise.
